Master Bedroom transformation...

It's still not finished, of course, but the master bedroom is at least livable. Of course, it was livable from the beginning, it was just really really ugly. There are these 11 panels on the walls with somewhat attractive trim around them. However, the paint used in the middle of the panels was a thickly textured popcorn paint. Really ugly. There is thick molding around all the doors, windows, and along the base of the walls. It took us some time to come up with the colors of the room; Cait was really the mastermind behind it.

When we started the wall preparation, we knew that we had to tackle the plaster cracks and the popcorn paint. Thank goodness we had Lukey Dukey around that week to guide us through our learning process. We originally planned on making a plaster of paris mix every hour. On one of the trips to Lowe's Luke brought back a 5 gallon container of joint compound that saved us hours of needless mixing.

And so began 4 days of wall preparation. We tried scraping the popcorn paint off the wall panels, but didn't want to further damage the plaster underneath, and realized it would probably take decades to finish. So we purchased a belt sander to flatten out the textured paint. I went around the room, one panel at a time, sanding the most thickly textured panels while Cait and Luke followed behind spackling each panel with the joint compound. We had to sand and spackle a second time to get each panel really flat. We also did this on all the other cracks around the room and the holes in the window molding. This was our first experience with wall preparation and I think its why we haven't tried tackling another room just yet...

Finally, we could get down to the fun stuff - actually painting! Before Luke went to join Ellie on their camping trip, he and Cait were able to prime the room with a grey primer - suggested to us by the Lowe's paint guy because we were going with a dark red for the main walls. We still had to do 3 coats to not be able to see through the red, but I'm sure it still made a difference. As Cait and I were doing the actually painting, we were having a hard time seeing the final product and kept questioning ourselves. "It's so dark!" we kept saying.

The day before Luke left, Friday, we tried figuring out how much time it would take to finish the room off. It was a relatively fast drying paint, so, we figured, that we could go back and forth with the kitchen and the bedroom every two hours, and be done with both rooms by the end of the day. We were so naive... Just the taping around the molding also took so much time. After the third coat of red, we were ready for the "spice". Cait told me it took her an hour and a half just to take the tape down! And then we had to put tape back up on the walls when we began the second color. At this point, it was already Monday or Tuesday, and we had been working through the weekend. As you all know, we are complete beginners at all of this, and advice and tips are always welcome.

We started the spice color with the panels; anything that could be rolled, we attacked. We bought smaller rollers for the smaller panels and the flat parts of the molding. Again, we were struck with doubt: with the blue tape, we were skeptical about the colors chosen. Cait compared it to a clown's collar. At least it was moving along fairly quickly. Until we had to do all the detailed sections of the molding with brushes. Working together it still took Cait and I 5 hours to finish the molding. I think when Luke and I were figuring out how long it would take we forgot the part about applying the paint. We were talking as if the paint would just apply itself, or as if it'd be up in 10 minutes like the ceiling paint. Not so much...

All this work was in the week leading up to our move, which happened on Saturday. So, we left the 3rd color, "Old Rose #6" (not pink...), which was going to be for the window seat, for another time. We really wanted to move into our room, because we had been sleeping on our couches in the living room for a few days, and Cait was done with that. So, we threw our mattress on the floor and called it a success!

We still have light sconces to put up, the doors have to be refinished (there is no handle on our main door), one of the windows has to be fixed, and the outlets need to changed, but its certainly better than when we started. All the experience accrued fixing the cracks, and applying the joint compound will serve us well when we start on the other rooms in the house. Next up is the tenant room in about 2 weeks. Lots of love, and can't wait to see you all soon!


Disregard (or make fun of) Cait's expression in that last picture - she had woken up about 2 minutes prior...

Calling all Plant and Weed Enthusiasts!

Ok, so the sudden gift of a couple of pots of herbs/useful weeds from a neighbor a few doors down has inspired me to wander around our own property to try and identify what green growth we've already got going on here at Fellows. Most seem to be common weeds but some are definitely useful ones (ie dandelion, plantain) and I think we may even have a couple leftover pretty perenials from a previous gardener. So I am calling upon the knowledge of the aunties, the mommies, and anyone else who might be able to help me identify these plants. Here goes!

I'm pretty sure these are two kinds of plantain - the first, more round-leaved one I believe is common plaintain, the second one with more narrow leaves a buckthorn plaintain???

This guy (from my brief internet searchings) looks like some sort of Dwarf Columbine?













I'm having trouble figuring out what this next one is - at first I thought it was some kind of 'dock', either curly dock or a broadleaf dock. But none of the pictures I've seen so far online look like they are big enough to match up to these big boys - they are huge! A little hairy on the top of the leaf, just a bit tho. I don't think they are hairy on the underside. No flowers yet, just these big broad sprawling leaves. And it's not like there are a bunch of them - they seem to be plopped invidiually throughout the yard :)












We had lots of pretty pretty violets in early spring - you can't see the flowers here but you can see the heart-shaped leaves. We've got them pretty much spread throughout the entire yard - they were one of the first bits of color after a long winter!







So, the last one I can kind of identify looks like a yellow woodsorrel. I thought it was clover at first, but after looking it up (plus it does have some yellow flowers!) I think it's woodsorrel instead.











These last couple I have no idea! There's a spikey weed that comes up all over the yard, a mint-looking (but not smelling!) leafy plant that grows everywhere, a a viny, round-leafed thing that looks like it has some small purple flowers, and a semi-daisy look-alike. Tho the white petals are very thin, almost aster-looking. Any ideas?

Thanks all! Will post more weed pics if there are requests!

luv luv
caitlin

PS - If you haven't figured it out already, you can click on the individual pictures to make them larger for your viewing pleasure!

Our Kitchen - Part Two!

Our kitchen at Fellows has undergone so many transformations. First it was the ripping down of the gunky wallpaper. Then it was scraping the rest of the gunkiness off the walls and cabinets! Then it was painting our lovely 'Caribbean Sunset' (yellow) and 'Soft Cream' (off-white) theme on the walls and wainscoting . . . and just when we'd gotten used to that we put on the final touch - our 'Deep Peri' (blue!) cabinets!! It really makes the room pop (think 'Holy Blueness Batman!' whenever we enter the room) and it IS nice to have doors to hide all our kitchen stuff - tho suddenly we DO have to make the effort to remember where we put everything; it's not all just freely accessible anymore!

And it was all done with the help of Jesse's Dad and Olga! For this past Memorial Day Weekend, we managed to strike a balance between relaxation and productivity! First on our TO-DO list was the cabinets: cleaned, primed, painted, installed, CHECK! Jesse and Olga even managed to make our yucky cabinet hardware shine like new! The large upper cabinets (see photos!) did become quite the production. If you think that it shouldn't be difficult for 4 grown people to install 4 SEEMINGLY IDENTICAL cabinets with holes for two OR three screws and hardware for two OR three screws . . . think again. Despite the Aunties' efforts a few months back to lable the cabinets (for just such a reason), we still had to play musical cabinets and shimmy things up and down and take two of the 'cooks' out of that crowded kitchen (the ladies left the boys scratching their heads) . . . .and it ended up LOVELY! The cabinets close and everything. Though if you ask Pops Goodglass, he might tell you the last cabinet on the left is about a 1/4 inch too low . . .and don't swing on it . . .

Next was painting the porch (CHECK!) and painting the last color in our bedroom - Old Rose #6 (definitely NOT pink). I think that color will go down in infamy . . . truth be told, in most lights it looks a little TOO similar to the rest of the bedroom (Porcelein Red) for my taste, but it's lovely just the same :) Finally, Jesse's Dad gave all our plants some breathing room in bigger pots and a good soaking outside. I think he must have whispered sweet nothings to them all as well because the next morning they all looked perky and happy to be green! I've been charged with their dosage of TLC and have promised to send regular picture updates - here's hoping none of them kick the bucket on my watch!

After a very productive weekend, we sent our merry painters/planters home to Jersey and loaded up a picnic to take down to Barry Park. Surprisingly our fellow park-goers on this holiday weekend were few and far between - so we got to sit down amongst the lilac forest growing there (most, sadly, already past peak) and munch on turkey sandwhiches and leftover sweet potatoes and sauteed brussel sprouts. We determined the weekend a total success and strolled back home to Fellows :)

Our kitchen!

We had taken Renee's advice during the lead-up to our official move-in and wanted to get at least 2 rooms done in order to have a "sanctuary" even though the rest of the house may be a disaster. Well, the rest of the house is certainly a disaster -- the living room, dining room, hallways, and other bedrooms all have paper on the floors and are filled with boxes of overflowing stuff, most of which we don't know where to put yet.

But the kitchen, yes the kitchen! We had Lukey Dukey up here for a whole 4 days of backbreaking work where he taught us how to spackle and paint like a pro. He put in hours the likes of which Steve and Robbie would quiver at! Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (a week and a half ago) he didn't let us leave the house until at least 10pm and on one of those days it was midnight! He worked us to the bone (or was it the other way round?)...

The trim work and the cabinets are still left to be done, but here's a progression of the work the kitchen has seen over the last few months...Bedroom post soon to follow.

Love ya!

And It Begins . . .

Ok, so the fact that I'm using this blog post as - yet again - a means of procrastination (although, thanks to my Neuro prof, I am more inclined to call it a necessary break, during which my brain can fully absorb and integrate all the info I have been packing in there . . .hmm . . .) DOES NOT mean that we don't love you all and want to be sharing all the fun and excitement of the past couple weeks.

It does, however, mean that I'll be attempting to keep this post short in order to get back to neural system development and basal ganglia and memory and plasticity (be glad you have plasticity folks - I'll have to devote another edition of 'Fireside Chats with a Student DPT' to that!). No worries - we've got loads of pictures that we'll be doling out piece-meal (?) . . .

The re-finished hardwood floors came out beautifully - our floor guy managed to get almost everything up: the scratches, the stains, the blobs of paint so casually drip-dropped all over by whomever attempted the last decorating job, etc. Only a few dark spots (we suspect puppy pee) remain, and we've decided that they add character :)

We do have a long laundry list indeed of all the jobs (little and big) that we'd like to get done on this new-to-us brick colonial - hopefully a good portion of it this summer when Jess and I will both be sharing 6 weeks off from school and work at the same tim (!). We've already had some help tackling THE LIST from family - we are so excited and grateful for their help! The aunties (Renee and Jan) were our first visitors - and they came armed to the teeth! Bearing armloads of woodworking, paint, design, and home furnishing magazines; fresh cut flowers; a steam-cleaner; seeds, seeds, seeds; and a LARGE bottle of wine, they helped us de-creepify the basement (no small feat), purchase our first shop-vac (he looks like R2-D2 but I believe we are settling on something like Niles or Jeffrey - yes, we do seem to have a strange urge to name inanimate objects - what?), AND strip ALL the old yucky, ugly (mostly yucky) wallpaper in the kitchen. Liz got to join us for about 24 hours (sorry for all the bus-time tiz!).

Since then, we've also had Stevo and his assistant Robbie Jr come up from South Jersey - Jesse's mom was nice enough to share him for the week AND to load up half Stevo's plumber truck with food for us all - thank you Margaret and Mary! I had school during the week so I'd toodle on over when I was done and join Jess, Stevo, and Robbie Jr over at the house. They stayed the whole week and were able to get some big projects done - a few of which included reworking the plumbing in the basement so our kitchen drain did not run uphill anymore, retiling and refurnishing the upstairs bathroom (sadly, we did NOT keep the purple wooden toilet seat that had previously graced that dubious throne), and . . . fixing the front porch! The porch turned out to be quite an adventure - I think maybe a bit more so than the boys had anticipated, tho I mostly tried to nod in sympathy at the mysterious multple layers of materials they managed to pull out of the roof (hey, at least I could recognise that rotten wood = bad). The porch is now safe, beautiful, and waterproof and later this summer Jess and I will be painting it. We had a lot of fun spending the week with them and getting ideas and advice for some of our other projects. Tho Robbie Jr may never want to see that porch ever again, he's always welcome back, even without his toolbelt! In fact, I'm going to have to be sending some care packages to them both as another thank you for all their help :)

Ok, so this is already longer than I intended, and we still have to tell you about paint choices and neighbors and Jesse's recent adventures in masonry! All will soon be revealed . . .





love love love
caitlin and jess

We . . . Are . . . HOMEOWNERS!!!

Wow, it's been a while! We've been in a whirlwind for the past few weeks - and failing on our promise to deliver an update - til now!

We officially closed on our first home together last Wednesday, with BIG/HUGE help from our real estate agent at Keller Williams, Jeff Roney, and our attorney Jim Casazza (aka Uncle Jim!). Everything went smoothly - and our hands didn't even get tired from signing our names over and over and over . . . When it was all done, we shook hands with all the lawyers and bank representatives present, took our manilla envelope of keys, and immediately drove over to our new (to us) house on Fellows Ave. It was pretty amazing to open the door on our own for the first time and scamper upstairs and down as if we hadn't already explored every inch of the house on our multiple previous visits with Jeff acting as chaperone :)

The house is so cool!!! Most of you have already seen lots of 'before' pictures - don't worry, by the end of all this we will have hundreds (thousands?) of 'before' AND 'after' pictures to thrust upon you all for years on end.

On our first night as homeowners, we honored a little tradition we had unsuspectingly started with our very first visit to Syracuse - on that day we had been looking at apartments in preparation for my move in May to start my DPT program at Upstate, and after spending a few hours driving up and down the streets of the University neighborhood, we were at a bit of a stalemate with which apartment we wanted to rent: I was ensnared by the hardwood floors, checker-tiled kitchen, cosy sunporch, and the "woman-of-independent-means-and-mentality" factor of our landlady. Jesse was leaning towards the cheaper apartment with the saggy porch.

(Let me just insert here, the cheaper apartment burned down at some point this year, so who had the better instincts, huh? Huh?? Plus, if we'd moved into that place, you all would have been tragically deprived of all the adorableness of 203 Hawthorne. Am I wrong?)

In order to sit down and really hammer out the pro's and con's of each place (yes, we live to make lists - a bit of the Rory Gilmore in us) - and to banish any cranky's with some food - we went into Alto Cinco's on Westcott St FOR THE FIRST TIME. It was a fortuitous start to a long love-affair with Alto Cinco's (insert here: catfish burrito, jalapeno cornbread, tofu BBQ burrito, spinach enchilada, etc) - we scribbled our notes regarding size and location and price and vibe-factor over a basket of sweet-potato fries and loaded nachos. The bartenders put in their 2-cents which quickly became 63-cents when they heard that the Hawthorne place had laundry machines on-site. They both liked the neighborhood too, and Alto Cinco's was, afterall, only about 3 blocks from the Hawthorne place.

Sooo - ever since then, we seem to find ourselves making plans, making decisions, dreaming about houses while perched over the copper-covered bar at Alto Cinco's, sharing a beer (a small but good and changing selection), a cheese plate, more sweet potato fries, whatever. We thought it only right that we celebrate our first night as homeowners with takeout from Alto Cinco's and a bottle of Herman Wiemer wine while sitting on blankets on the floor of our future bedroom.

This has already turned into a long post - and there's so much more to tell! Stay tuned for more pictures, more stories, the gory details of our whole-house clean-up!

Love to you all
Caitlin and Jesse

My Big Girl Crush on Garrison Keillor

Yes, that sultry, robust voice has made my little heart go all a-flutter. The website for 'A Prairie Home Companion' is amazingly extensive and organized. I believe you can listen to every past show they've had, rifle through Garrison Keillor's weekly column writings, see pictures and video clips of live performances . . .

The inspiration, however, for this particular post of mine is the ditty in Segment 1 written and performed by Garrison Keillor and 'The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band' in honor of our new President. It's a tribute to the tune of "You're The Top" and it is sweetly joyful, slightly bawdy, and a perfect example of why President Obama is, as GK puts it (and I may be paraphrasing here), "a man half the country believes they have a personal relationship with."

Check it out - and enjoy!